This activity involves working with nonfiniteclauses to do some sentence-splitting and sentence-joining. The purpose is to develop your awareness of the different kinds of structures that are available to you as a writer.

In this lesson, we look at the difference between two kinds of
relative clause. A relative clause is a special kind of subordinate clause, and like other subordinate clauses it is introduced by a subordinating conjunction. More specifically, the introduction of a relative clause can be carried out by a relative pronoun.

In what situation would somebody use the clause the car which is yellow? For example: the car which is yellow is mine, the car which is blue is yours and the car which is red is John’s. If I say the car which is yellow, am I giving you more information about a particular car we were already talking about by telling you its colour – or am I helping you to identify the car by telling you that it is the yellow one rather than the red one or the blue one?

Sort these examples of relative clauses from the ICE-GB corpus according to whether you think they are restrictive (identifying) or non-restrictive (adding). Were there any cases where you had difficulty deciding which reading to choose? What clues did you use to help you decide?

Non-restrictive relative clauses are often – although not always – surrounded by commas, which separate the additional information that the relative clause contains. In the following examples, see if you can put the commas in the right place to separate out the restrictive relative.

Now have a go at writing your own relative clauses by mixing
and matching the clauses below. Join them together with that, which or who.
Choose how you are going to make
your meaning clear to the reader.

·Are you going to use punctuation to identify a
restrictive relative clause?

Lesson Plan

Goals

To learn and practise the spelling rules associated with base words ending in 'y' when endings (suffixes) are added.

Lesson plan

The lesson is divided into a series of activities where students
group words according to whether they keep the final 'y' of the base word when a suffix is added, or change 'y' to 'i'. For each set of examples, students are
asked to identify and make predictions about the patterns for this area
of spelling.